API data consumption, bulk data access

[oisact]

It isn't clear what the hard API rate / volume limits are for accessing weather forecast data from the API. For some types of data, like alerts, it appears possible to request extremely large geographic areas (potentially the entire country) in a single API call. However. for forecast data it seems we have to request one specific forecast grid point at a time. Further, the time required for the API to return data is (relatively speaking) slow, and errors are common.

Our app currently only supports a few states, however we are rolling out nationwide support soon. All our app data requests go through our servers, which perform intelligent caching so that the only requests we perform to the NWS are to retrieve new data only as needed. Even so, the volume of data required to provide forecast data across the country would be very significant.

Is there a method to retrieve forecast and hourly forecast data in bulk using the API, so we aren't requesting a single gridpoint at a time?
If not are there other methods of accessing NWS forecast data, such as bulk binary blobs or such, that we can use for maximum efficiency in retrieving data?